Some time ago, a woman in her 50s approached me in a shopping mall and asked if I was the columnist who had written about finding herself single after years spent as a wife and mother. She said, “Was it you who wrote that the best thing about waking up alone on a Sunday morning is the quiet, and that the worst thing about waking up alone on a Sunday morning is the quiet?”

I said yes, and we chatted about how those words resonated with her and her single friends, and about how odd, and surprising, it was to be part of a generation of women who couldn’t have imagined a life of loneliness when we set out as fresh-faced newlyweds all those decades ago.

But here we are today, millions of us, women — and men, too — waking up alone, stretching languidly in the morning sun, knowing the day is ours to do with as we please, our children’s laughter a faint echo down the hallway, the house eerily still and quiet where once the walls could barely contain the noisy joy within.

For many of us, life has settled for loneliness.

In April, the Vancouver Foundation released a poll of local community leaders who said their greatest concern about modern life in Metro Vancouver was the increasing social isolation of its residents. They cited decreasing community involvement, low voter turnout, falling rates of volunteerism and the growing lack of good old-fashioned neighbourliness.

We have, apparently, become a city of loners.

On Monday, in the first part of this newspaper’s Growing Apart series, a new Vancouver Foundation poll found that one in four respondents felt alone more often than they liked.

Some of the reasons are unique to Vancouver, but most are not. Weather that keeps us indoors. Immigration, which has created impenetrable enclaves where people prefer their own kind. Condo culture, which has forested the sky with thousands of tiny birdcages. The Internet, which encourages the virtual life without benefit of handshake.

And then there are the shifting demographics, and the culturally skewed fallout from the baby boomer generation that saw divorce spike, marriage and birthrates plummet, and more single-person households in Canada than history has ever recorded.

Loneliness is now a fact of life for millions of us. We are fools, though, to hold a pity party. We make choices in life. We pass up opportunities, and hold to expectations that cannot be realized. Some even like solitude, preferring the insular life with no demands, no obligations, no compromise. Many of us embrace gloominess and incivility like a badge of honour. Interestingly, the Vancouver Foundation poll found that one-third of its 3,800 respondents had little interest in getting to know their neighbours, as if that would somehow impinge on their cherished privacy.

It’s a cultural anomaly, to be sure. Humans are by nature social creatures and this bulge of universal loneliness seems oddly out of sync with our anthropological yearning for community, for touch and talk, for connectedness.

Some have even theorized that social isolation makes us sick, weakening the immune system and making us more vulnerable to disease.

The truth is that our sense of community, our relationships with each other and with our friends and neighbours, is what brings us together as a society, what forms the bedrock of our collective resilience and longevity.

Endemic loneliness, whether self-inflicted or culturally imposed, is a troubling social affliction, a sign that our times are indeed changing, and that the once-familiar, close-knit family unit — where we relied upon each other for company and contact — is fractured like never before, perhaps irrevocably.

I’ve been the only person in my home for the past 15 years and I can attest that, mostly, it sucks. Loneliness is about settling into a routine that screams, “I am a family of one” around every quiet corner, that has no need for a full set of dishes or a heavy-duty washing machine or side-by-side bathroom sinks.

Loneliness means taking out the garbage, shlepping groceries, cooking, paying bills and shouldering the household responsibilities by yourself. It means no intimacy of the kind that once brought pleasure, no shoulder to lean on at the Saturday matinee, and no one to talk to about the news of the day or those things that are so private they can only be shared by a partner.

Like Three Dog Night so plaintively sang it 43 years ago, one truly is the loneliest number.

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